Guest: Pranav Myana (LinkedIn)
Organization/Company: LF Energy (Twitter) | Amaterra Tech
Show: State of Energy

In this episode of State of Energy recorded at the 2023 LF Energy Summit in Paris, Amaterra Tech Founder and CEO Pranav Myana talks about how a personal tragedy inspired the creation of his company at such a young age. He also shares his experience at the Summit.

He founded Amaterra Tech that designs and builds low-cost, stable, and clean microgrids, which are smaller localized versions of the power grid. It offers a distributed software-based solution to control these microgrids efficiently.

Highlights of this video interview:

• 19-year-old Myana is an American citizen, but his ancestors hailed from Telangana, a small village in India. Last year, he started the company after a trip to his homeland.
• The main industry is power loom weaving, which requires a lot of energy to run. He found out that in the 2000s, the government and the energy providers were not able to supply energy to the community. Unable to work, people got into deep debt that resulted in a socioeconomic catastrophe. Hundreds of people died within just a few years, including his relatives.
• He wants to dedicate his entire life to making sure everybody has access to clean, stable, and low-cost energy. When he got back to the US, he started a company.
• Amaterra Tech builds microgrids; their hybrid AC/DC microgrids combined with their technology can make installing energy capacity over 30% cheaper and transmission over 15% cheaper.
• He says the secret to his company is knowing how to listen. Countries and communities within countries have different wants and needs. You need to hear them out and optimize your solution for them. You can’t be stuck in the same way that you’ve been doing something, and you can’t force one solution either. You have to get on the field, meet them in person, and work with them to find what works best, especially with something so integral and foundational as energy.
• Myana received a scholarship from the Shuli Goodman Memorial Fund. It gives $2,500 to young professionals and students who want to attend the LF Energy Summit to learn and do more within the energy industry.
• He says the LF Energy Summit has been enlightening. The participants are open to hearing out your ideas. He is amazed at how the presentations have been able to translate esoteric statistics into actionable items. Example: In the Futurewei talk, it put a cost on personal computing and it put a social cost on using the different kinds of coding languages so people can visualize what they were doing to the environment and to the world.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.